Many Are Cold, Few Are Frozen

James Bedford’s words – “I’m feeling better” – would have been funny had
they not been the last utterance of a dying man. On January 12, 1967,
the retired psychology professor in Glendale, California passed way. Or
as advocates of cryonics would later phrase it, Bedford “deanimated.”

Major newspapers from coast to coast described the “eerie commotion”
that accompanied Bedford’s passing in morbid detail.1 After he was
pronounced dead, an anti-coagulant drug was injected into him while a
mechanical heart maintained blood flow. Other chemicals followed. Six
hours later, his body wrapped in aluminum foil was placed in dry ice
before members of the Cryonics Society of California transferred it to a
“cryo-capsule” – a giant dewar filled with liquid nitrogen fabricated by
a Phoenix-based wig-maker – for transfer to storage center in Arizona.

Dewars at the Alcor Life Extension Foundation in
Scottsdale, Arizona. Each of these can hold four wholebody patients.
(Photo courtesy of Alcor Life Extension Foundation.)

Doctors at UCLA branded the experiment “absurd” but, not surprisingly,
it received wide press coverage. Advocates claimed, given cryonics’
potential benefits, that academic scientists should at least investigate
before dismissing the idea.2 Science fiction writer-futurist – a
“blue skyer” according to the New York Times – Frederick Pohl told a
group of insurance industry executives that they should prepare for the
“$30 trillion market of the future” and write policies to cover cryonic
suspension.”3

Fiction writers had already engaged with cryonics for decades. Edgar
Allen Poe and Jack London both wrote stories featuring cold-induced
immortality before 1900. It remained a durable theme in magazines
published by Hugo Gernsback before World War Two. After 1945, ideas for
cryonic suspension were discussed seriously by reputable scientists at
established institutions, often with some sort of connection to space
exploration or technological utopianism in general. For example, two
medical scientists discussed the possibility of lowering a person’s
metabolic rate in order to permit long-term space travel, coining the
word “cyborg” at the same time. Books and articles about life extension
via freezing appeared, the best known one being Robert Ettinger’s The
Prospect of Immortality. In 1966, Columbia University physicist Gerald
Feinberg discussed the science of life prolongation in the widely read
magazine Physics Today.4 While these helped bring cryonics to a
wider audience, mainstream scientific publications, not surprisingly,
remained chilly to the idea.5

Nonetheless, 1967 stands as the tipping point for public awareness of
cryonics. News coverage of the fledgling cryonics movement situated it
somewhere between, hubristic, hopeful, and humorous. If the average
person had missed coverage of James Bedford’s suspension, they might
have seen a variation of the idea a month later on national television.
On 16 February of that year, CBS broadcast the Star Trek episode
called “Space Seed.” It wove a series of themes – extended human space
travel, life extension via cryogenic suspension, and personal
improvement via genetic modification – which became standard motifs for
the transhumanist movement a few decades later.

In “Space Seed,” the crew of the Enterprise encounter Khan Noonien
Singh, a genetically superior yet morally deficient tyrant who, after
the “Eugenics Wars” of the 1990s had been cryogenically suspended and
exiled into deep space.6 Some 13 million Americans watched Capt. Kirk
and his crew awaken Khan from his cold-induced sleep. After reviving,
Khan, aided by a sympathetic, smitten historian, fights to take over the
Enterprise. After failing to win control, Kirk banishes Khan again,
this time to an abandoned planet. Khan accepts his fate, seeing it as a
both a challenge and chance to tame a new world. The superhuman Khan
became a popular, profit-generating character for the Star Trek
franchise well into the 21^st^ century.

After the publicity following Bedford’s cryonic suspension, new
organizations sprang up to support the small but growing cryonics
community. To help make their case, advocates of cryonics cited major
advances in medicine and technology – space exploration and nascent
genetic engineering were often given as evidence – that had occurred
throughout the 20^th^ century. To them, this was evidence that future
technologies would surely offer some means to revive them from their
preserved state.7 A typical argument advocates deployed followed a
logic reminiscent of Pascal’s Wager, stating that the benefits of
signing up for cryonics, even if the likelihood of revival was small,
far out-weighed the costs. This is a point, often missed, that
cryonicists make. Their goal is not to bring a person back from the dead
but rather to interrupt the dying process before it has proceeded too
far. As one organization phrases it – “Would you rather be in the
experimental group or the control group?”8

Membership was especially active in the Los Angeles and Silicon Valley
areas where people, perhaps more than other regions, had a passion for
technology, seen literally as their potential savior, and an unabashed
faith in the future. In 1969, the Cryonics Society of California, for
example, claimed 500 members and announced plans to build a “long-term
depository” in Barstow.9 Fred Chamberlain, an employee at the Jet
Propulsion Laboratory, started a company called Manrise in La Canada
with his partner Linda. Three years later, they self-published one of
the first manuals for cryo-preservation.10 The Chamberlains formed
the Alcor Society for Solid State Hypothermia which became the world’s
largest cryonics organization.11 Art imitated life a few years later
and humor trumped horror when Woody Allen used cryonics to set up the
plot of his goofy comic film Sleeper.

Cryonics rests in an overlapping space between science fiction and
certain kind of speculative research, seeking mainstream scientific
respectability albeit unsuccessfully. Just as intriguing is the way in
which cryonics intersects with people’s perceptions of the future. As
the Los Angeles Times reported in 1972, “The Future. Cryonics leaders
talk about it with a passion bordering on reverence. The future, they
say, belongs to science. The Golden Age of Biomedical Technology is at
hand. Are they wrong?”12

The hundreds of people who have signed up for cryonics believe fervently
in the future. For them, spending years suspended in liquid nitrogen,
awaiting a possible reawakening is neither hilarious nor horrific. It is
act of hope. Cryonicists believe in a future where they will be
healthy once again, perhaps reunited with friends and family. Moreover,
they imagine that the intervening years between death and reanimation
will be stable enough, economically and socially, to maintain their
suspension. During this time, they trust advanced technologies will be
developed and perfected so as to enable their rejuvenation. The apogee
of this optimism is that, for cryonicists, the future is a temporal
place where they both wish to exist and where they will be accepted,
wanted, and perhaps loved. As one adherent stated, “I think the future
is going to be kinder and gentler than the present. Cryonics is another
medical procedure.”13

Cryonics might appear to skeptics – and, to be fair, most mainstream
coverage of cryonics trends this way – as an outlier even in the “freak
show that is the boundless-optimism school of technological
forecasting.”14 A more historically accurate and empathetic reading,
however, can situate cryonics into a wider frame. We can, for example,
see it as part a long-standing secular belief, especially common among
Americans, in technological millennialism.15 By this, I mean the idea
that a new more perfect age waits and technology, not divinity, will
construct it. This new age will not, however, be available for all but
only open to those who have invested their faith and a little fortune.

What does the spike of interest in cryonics in the 1960s tell us about
the histories of science and medicine? It reminds us to reconsider that
pervasive yet elusive term “context.” As researchers developed
artificial organs and life support systems, death itself was subject to
reexamination.16 In 1968, a legal dictionary defined death as
“stoppage of the circulation of the blood, and a cessation of the animal
and vital functions consequent thereon, such as respiration, pulsation,
etc.” But this definition was already under scrutiny by doctors,
ethicists, and theologians.17 As death became less of an event and
more of a process, optimists’ belief in the possibility of cryonics
becomes more understandable.

The emergence of cryonics c. 1967 also tells us something about
science itself. The experimentation of the early cryonicists reflects
their belief that much remained to be discovered about the natural
world. In this telling, science means progress and improvement, with
advances coming that are both unexpected and full of possibility.
Coupled with this was a growing materialist philosophy which held that a
person’s intelligence and personality resided in the physical structure
of their brain.18 Preserve this and – like extracting information
from a failed hard drive – revival might be possible.

Ultimately, cryonics connects to what Reinhart Koselleck called
“horizons of expectation.”19 Understanding the experience of people
experimenting with cryonics in 1967 becomes richer when we consider
their expectations for the future. Cryonicists, frozen in the present,
expected a future in which they might live again. However, as we (and
they) approach the temporal horizon, it forever recedes, etching a fine
yet eternal line that separates present from future, real from possible,
and science from faith.

The idea of people going into cold-induced suspended animation has
long been a staple of space travel in sci-fi fiction and films.
American rocket pioneer Robert Goddard even speculated on the
possibility of “generation ships” that might carry people, their
life functions suspended, far out into space. “It has long been
known,” he wrote, “that protoplasm can remain inanimate for great
periods of time, and can also withstand great cold, if in the
granular state.” From “The Great Migration,” from p. 1611-1612 of
Robert Goddard and G.E. Pendray, eds., The Papers of Robert H.
Goddard. Vol. 3 (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1970). ↩

This form of reasoning later attracted considerable ridicule;
Michael Shermer. “Nano Nonsense and Cryonics.” Scientific
American, September 2001, 29: “Look how far we’ve come in just a
century, believers argue – from the Wright brothers to Neil
Armstrong in only 66 years. Extrapolate these trends out 1,000
years, or 10,000, and immortality is virtually certain.” ↩

A. Michael Aron. “The New Ice Age.” Los Angeles Times, 10 June
1972. This article was focused on the cryo-preservation of a
Californian teenager who died of cancer in 1972; according to the
article, she was preserved at a California facility with seven other
patients. ↩

For example, see discussion in President’s Commission for the
Study of Ethical Problems in Medicine and Biomedical and Behavioral
Research, Defining Death: Medical, Legal, and Ethical Issues in the
Determination of Death, 1981. ↩

In 1968, physicians at the Harvard Medical School offered a new
set of criteria, defined as “brain death.” “Report of the Ad Hoc
Committee of the Harvard Medical School to examine the definition of
brain death. A definition of irreversible coma.” JAMA 1968; 205:
337-40. See also how The concept of brain death did not evolve to benefit organ transplants. ↩

Ashlee Vance, “In Pursuit of a Mind Map, Slice by Slice, “The
New York Times, 27 December 2010: D1. ↩